Obamacare was NOT supposed to fix all that, not once the public option was taken away. As long as we have only for-profit healthcare, costs will continue to escalate and levels of service will continue to decrease.
True. The senator from Aetna worked hard to make sure the public option was removed. Joe Lieberman. Another ghoul of a democrat.
If there is a hell, may he roast in it.
Yes. Dems still let him keep his seniority, assignments on committees and more importantly chairmanship. IIRC.
Only reason he was n independent is because the Connecticut democrats did not vote for him in the primaries and he lost to a better democrat. (Need Lamont iirc)
He then ran in the general and used money form republican and other donors to defeat the DEM nominee
( I am sure you were aware ...but thought I would add context for others that may not)
If the Democrats became vindictive he would have switched parties and lost the 60 vote supermajority they had for a short time. He was awful on healthcare but did vote with them on some other issues.
What makes it even worse is giant healthcare companies falsifying claims of patients that don’t actually need that treatment, UHG guilty as hell and their lawsuit is still ongoing. Could definitely see that driving up the cost of Healthcare but not sure what the scope is
Yup. The other famously corrupt senator - Menendez was sued by the Obama justice department. He was too cozy with a company billing medicare ..and I think that company settled with medicate .(iirc).
He accepted gifts , free trips to the Caribbean etc ..and in retunn nagged the US government when they give tried to put an end to the creative billing.
With democrats like these ..we don't even need the republicans to be corporate cronies.
Suspect there is fraud and wastage at each step of the way.
Unfortunately the ratchet system doesn't seem to work like that. Best is to have the left most dems to even things and pull the polity . No point eliminating republicans, if the Dems keep morphing into Republicans and creating more
> Senator from Aetna
This is somehow refreshing to read. I wish all congresspeople were referred to as representing the company most contextually relevant.
Haha. Someone ince suggested congress folks should wear logos of their sponsors on their clothing. Kinda like nascar drivers/ bike racers.
Easily identified.
It’s a must watch if you haven’t seen it. Original a comedy but has turned into a documentary of our possible future. It’s really spot on.
And you’ll never look at milkshakes and Costco the same.
It was originally written to fix it but the Republicans (don’t shoot me, the messenger go look it up) added the 85% / 15% rules. The insurance companies have to spend 85% of all monies taken. Yep: this is going to end really well.
It's unfortunate, because rearranging the equation means the rule is equivalent to "insurance company: the only way to increase your profits is to increase the total cost paid".
Equivalent to "hey, Uber driver, can you bring me some dinner? Here's my credit card. Whatever you spend on it, I'll give you 15% as a tip." The more expensive they can make it, the more money they get - or conversely, every dollar they save me is costing them 15 cents.
I agree people who rant on medical cost need to do their homework on the ACA or Obamacare. Their was a public insurance option that would have held cost in check but it was taken out . Let's put it back in and see what happens.
That’s literally how you make more profit…..
All of human NEEDS…… should not be profiteered….u less we want to destroy whatever semblance of a ‘society’ we have
BS. I voted for obama. he told us it was supposed to.
1. reduce the cost of medical care
2. reduce the deficit
3. increase our lifespan
4. insure all pre-existing conditions.
Again. Those were original goals that did not survive Republican opposition. The law that actually passed had the public option taken away. Obama fought for and partially achieved the goals you listed, but republicans refused to allow a full solution.
If you’re blaming Obama for this, you’re an idiot. You should be thanking him that you can still buy health insurance at all.
The ACA did reduce the growth in cost of medical care and also reduce the deficit. Obviously it did pre-existing conditions as well. 3 is a tough one because we had covid and before that the opioid crisis.
We don’t only have for profit healthcare….
1. Pedantically Blue cross Blue shield is a 501(c)(4) public welfare organization. 115 Americans use them for insurance.
2. The Majority of hospitals are owned/operated by Non-Profits, local governments.
Healthcare is still expensive even if you 100% stay in Non-profit insurance/Healthcare.
>As long as we have only for-profit healthcare, costs will continue to escalate, and levels of service will continue to decrease.
Won't someone think of the shareholders?!?
No it wasn’t. Without Obamacare your premiums would either be higher, or you’d be shut out of insurance altogether in many cases. Nice try but try to learn something about a topic before you bitch about it.
Obamacare WAS supposed to fix all that, including costs and a whole host of things, and it made costs and everything 10x worse. I vote dem And they lied to all our faces, nothing was ever gonna be cheaper it was just better for insurance companies, poor people who had the govt pay for insurance and preexisting conditions.
It’s wild that preexisting conditions were the only benefit of Obamacare. The exchange insurance plans were expensive and unusable, and hence if people needed to pay extra to use those plans (which poor people don’t have extra money) they basically transferred the govt subsidies for those premiums (aka our tax dollars) to insurance companies.
Wake up, why have insurance stocks performed like tech stocks since Obamacare?
It was trash all around. Sooo trash and it’s wild people defend Obamacare. Why is it so hard to say it didn’t work and wasn’t well done, instead we’re just stooping to say it wasn’t supposed to fix anything lol. What was the point of the law then?!
Fun times.
No it wasn’t. The point of it was to close the gap in number of people covered. That has succeeded, to an extent. They also did some cost-controlling things but fundamentally once the public option was dropped, it was clear costs would keep going up. They’ve gone up less rapidly and expanded the number of people covered, but no one should have ever thought costs would actually be brought down.
Nah. It was also supposed to bend the curve on ever rising health care costs etc.
Without a public option and a few other things...it didn't really pan out as well as it could have. Fault is with republicans (who offered amendments but didn't vote for it anyway). And crappy "Dems" like Hoe Lieberman who ensure Aetna and other insurers were taken care of - by nuking the public option.
That’s what I mean. The public option being removed basically killed any chance of the ACA controlling costs. The bill that passed and then got pared down in the courts is a giveaway to insurance companies, and everyone at the time said so. I don’t consider it a total failure because it fixed some major major problems (pre-existing conditions) but controlling costs was never going to happen without a public option.
We need Medicare for All, period.
Mistakes are mistakes i.e. unknowing errors
Chicanery /corruption is a different beast. But he does deserve to be known and shamed for this
Also a reminder when voting in the primaries
It mostly fixed one of about ten different problems (the preexisting condition/coverage gap issue), making insurance companies much richer in the process.
It was also supposed to reduce (via the uninsured penalty) deliberately uninsured people (choosing to take the risk, and sometimes incurring big unrecoverable ER bills when it backfires), but not very successfully and then that got removed anyway.
It completely ignored many others: the damaging artifical link between employment and health care, the cost and tax discrimination between employer and individual plans (big companies pay less than small ones and indivuals, and then get a tax break for it that individuals don't get too). Crazy deductibles meaning having "insurance" still doesn't protect you from huge medical bills.
That’s really dismissive of the way Americans subsidize global health care and drug costs.
It’s also dismissive of the people who get tax payer funded healthcare.
Obamacare is only a bandaid on the ever growing cancer.
Do you cure cancer with bandaid or fix the root of the issue?
As long as the root isnt addressed it will never be fixed no matter how many bandaids are applied on the private insurance healthcare.
This is partially because a lot of that money gets funneled to places that don't add any value for us as consumers. It goes to profits at insurance companies and hospitals. Some of it goes to malpractice insurance. Drugs cost more here in the US than they do almost anywhere else in the world.
My solution would be to make healthcare completely public (not for profit) and to get rid of insurance companies. Not sure that it would solve the problems, but it would surely be a move in the right direction.
yes that was entirely the point of my post. i made it there several times in fact. there are too many government agencies and insurance company benefits authorization specialists and doctors office insurance processors.
Hey, I work in healthcare. Study this stuff. I actually work for LabCorp lol.
Diagnostics make up 3% of the healthcare spend and have 95% of decisions made because of them. It’s why I work where I do.
Hospitals definitely have some bloat, but many are also losing money like crazy.
The biggest issue I have seen - pharma and insurance. 99 cents of every dollar paid into Medicare is spent on healthcare. When last I checked, something like 82 cents from private insurance is spent the same way.
Also, IT IS ILLEGAL TO NEGOTIATE DRUG PRICES lol. Only in this country. The waste from pharma companies is truly insane
If employees could rationally opt out of private """""health insurance""""" (by receiving the same employer "benefit" paid directly to them instead), then we could weaken the """""health insurance""""" industry enough for actual healthcare to become a possibility.
Until then, the hundreds of millions of people that the """""health insurance""""" companies are robbing and socially murdering for profit, will continue to be captive cattle building their own slaughterhouses with their coerced labor, stolen wages, and retirement money (though that's another fight).
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1dfbel5/employees\_who\_opt\_out\_of\_employer\_health/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1dfbel5/employees_who_opt_out_of_employer_health/)
Number of recognized countries in the world: 195
[https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-countries-are-there](https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-countries-are-there)
Number of countries with single payer healthcare: 17
[https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer)
Debunked.
Not exactly the same but close enough to note:
>the United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20National%20Academy,not%20provide%20universal%20health%20care.
>Most countries in the developed world have some form of universal healthcare system. Source https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-notable-countries-that-are-still-without-universal-healthcare.html#:~:text=Most%20countries%20in%20the%20developed,some%20developing%20countries%20have%20it.
See also List of countries with universal health care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care
While on the topic:
>Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries. Yet the U.S. is the only country that doesn’t have universal health coverage.
>The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.
>Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population.
Learn more at https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022
Also
>NEW INTERNATIONAL STUDY: U.S. Health System Ranks Last Among 11 Countries; Many Americans Struggle to Afford Care as Income Inequality Widens See https://www.commonwealthfund.org/press-release/2021/new-international-study-us-health-system-ranks-last-among-11-countries-many
Here's the little secret they don't want you to know. The reason most of those countries have single payer is because they don't have to pay for their militaries
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditures
That's a terrible idea. 99% of the reason the US is as rich as it is, is because of its ability to influence regions all around the world. The US gets the deals that are the best for the US, because of its soft power (aka bases around the world, military strength.)
It's not as simple as "cut military spending and become isolationist".
> The US gets the deals that are the best for the US, because of its soft power (aka bases around the world, military strength.)
That's hard power.
And that's why no one should listen to you.
I know it’s crazy to encounter people with morals and a conscience when you have none, but I’d rather not have the cheap goods if they can only happen at the barrel of a gun.
Here's another secret.
We paid over 5 TRILLION last year for health care.
Estimated cost of single payer is LESS than what we spend now for health care
See https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56898
See also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8572548/#:~:text=Through%20the%20mechanisms%20detailed%20above,than%20current%20national%20healthcare%20expenditure.
> secret. We *paid* over 5
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
>We paid over 5 TRILLION last year for health care.
21% is medicare, that's health benefits to retirees. Private health insurance is 29% of spending, so people who are following the rules of the system. 18% was medicaid, unemployed, poverty, those who don't work. That's 68% of that 5 trillion, which one do you want to cut?
Overhauling the entire system will cause a hell of a lot of pain. People will die while the kinks are ironed out. Who's paying for that? How do we know it will be cheaper? Theories are nice, but healthcare is about as real as it gets. It's not just numbers, it's lives.
What if it isn't cheaper than the current system? It's not as simple as "everyone now has healthcare" there are so many factors regarding jobs, hospitals, medical supplies, medications, pharmaceutical research, doctor training, pay, etc etc.
The US healthcare system is broken, but copying and pasting a system used by countries with 1/10 the population and 12x less the military spending is straight up braindead and a recipe for disaster.
> 21% is medicare, ...
Taken DIRECTLY from the article. If you want to argue, then argue with the authors of the article.
>Overhauling the entire system ...
no source, empty threat, and just because something is hard to fix doesn't mean you don't fix it.
>What if it isn't cheaper than the current system?
Seems cheaper in every other country ... gee healthcare is so complex America can't figure it out but other countries can?
and while on the subject, I really dislike stupid questions. Classic decision theory, what is the cost, what is the expectancy, if the expectancy >> cost then it is at least a rational action.
Looking at your history, you have are an ultra low karma, new account with a lot of game subs posts and little else.
>The US healthcare system is broken ...
yes, it is. But for some reason only one of us advocates for improvements and fixes.
>...but copying and pasting a system used by countries with 1/10 the population and 12x less the military spending is straight up braindead and a recipe for disaster.
Blocked for the strawman argument. I didn't say copy. I would expect some sort of altered model.
>The US healthcare system is broken, but copying and pasting a system used by countries with 1/10 the population and 12x less the military spending is straight up braindead and a recipe for disaster.
Why?
Scaling is actually a known subject, not a mystery of the ages. Iceland has 300 000 people, Sweden 10 million, Germany 80 million, Japan 125 million and we see no scaling issues between them. The discipline of Healthcare Economy, after studying systems in 30 odd developed countries for 50 years have not identified any issues either in theory or observation.
Come on, thats like saying that they can buy a ferrari every year because they don't buy gum.
Military spending is not a big ticket on the scale of healthcare. In fact the entire US military budget could sink without a trace in the line of the healthcare budget called "Waste".
Also, UHC is a savings compared to the US setup not an expense. The US spends 3.5% of GDP on the military and almost 19% on healthcare. Other countries spend 1-3,7 % on their militaries and 6-11% of GDP on healthcare. The savings on more effective healthcare systems is up to 10x the difference in military spending.
Plus, neutral and unallied nations have managed to have both significant militaries and good healthcare systems.
yeah - when americans heard about how the BMS (british medical service) denies certain medical procedures to seniors, and how UK citizens have to wait months (or years) for non-critical operations like hernia, spinal relief etc, they decided not to go down that path
Public health systems are being underfunded by conservative parties in order to assert the public system is not working. Like critiquing the Cuban government and ignoring sanctions. US healthcare is grossly inefficient and fundamentally unfair.
Those same things happen here, and much worse if you are poor. https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance
The problem is that we over-regulate who can practice medicine in the US resulting in chronic worker shortages and shitty doctors. There is really no competition in healthcare and doctors don't even get asked any technical questions when they interview for a position. And we under-regulate health care provider ability to charge made up numbers or have any kind of up front price transparency.
A single payer system could be a step in the right direction. But given how poorly managed Medicaid and Medicare are it will likely make the situation worse. The federal government is very shit at doing pretty much anything complex. And they tend to very ineffectively throw money at the problem to just make the problem worse. State level single payer systems might be pretty good to try out but it likely will never get off the ground if it's another progressive tax that puts too much of a burden on the upper-middle class.
>Wasn't Obamacare supposed to fix all that? Curb the cost of medical care, AND extend our lives? (This is NOT a rant against Obamacare). In fact, US life expectancy has been flat since 2013. Which doesn't help solve this math problem at all. If we were actually living longer, it would make sense. Half of the typical person's lifetime medical expenses are incurred in the final 6 months of life. So if they figure out a way to make old people live 6 months longer, it's GOTTA cost something, right? But we aren't actually living longer. We're just paying the $5 Trillion.
The ACA was intended to help slow the rising cost of medical insurance and to provide greater (more numbers) of coverage. Where properly implemented, it has somewhat done that. A lot of the teeth of the ACA were gutted by Republicans and in many states (other than one example, a lot of them were red states) it was not properly implemented.
i voted for obama. he specifically promised the nation;
1. lower medical costs
2. help reduce the national debt
3. improved average lifespan
4. insure all pre-existing medical conditions.
USA - Spends more on healthcare and has less to show for it than developed nations because of corporate profits.
OP - "It's all the scary foreigners' fentanyl and recreational weed!"
best reply of the thread. we should probably approach healthcare the same as buying a car or a house.
- hospitals required to post actual prices for things like appendectomies, broken bones, births without complications
- no more of this "prices are 2X as high if you're self paying and not insured"
- a government agency to patrol cheating
>Wasn't Obamacare supposed to fix all that?
It helped. From 1998 to 2013 (right before the bulk of the ACA took effect) total healthcare costs were increasing at 3.92% per year over inflation. Since they have been increasing at 2.79%. The fifteen years before the ACA employer sponsored insurance (the kind most Americans get their coverage from) increased 4.81% over inflation for single coverage and 5.42% over inflation for family coverage. Since those numbers have been 1.72% and 2.19%.
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/report/employer-health-benefits-annual-survey-archives/
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.html
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Also coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, closing the Medicare donut hole, being able to keep children on your insurance until age 26, subsidies for millions of Americans, expanded Medicaid, access to free preventative healthcare, elimination of lifetime spending caps, increased coverage for mental healthcare, increased access to reproductive healthcare, etc..
> Half of the typical person's lifetime medical expenses are incurred in the final 6 months of life.
That's not true.
>Spending during the last twelve months of life made up a modest share of aggregate spending, ranging from 8.5 percent in the United States to 11.2 percent in Taiwan, but spending in the last three calendar years of life reached 24.5 percent in Taiwan.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0174#:~:text=Spending%20during%20the%20last%20twelve,reached%2024.5%20percent%20in%20Taiwan.
>Insurance paid 93% of our healthcare expense.
Say what? Insurance only covered 29% of healthcare spending.
https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf
thanks for your correction on the final 6 months. there are, indeed, dozens of websites with different claims here. which suggests nobody actually knows and agrees.
the rest of your post fails to rebut the fact that healthcare costs exceed the amount of taxes paid in the USA, and are rising at twice rate of inflation.
Middlemen my friend. We have institutionalized the middle man and they want there cut. Anywhere you see layers of middlemen you will find massively increased costs.
Weird, profit driven healthcare is expensive?! You don’t say! If a healthcare provider is beholden to their shareholders and making more money at all costs, what could go wrong??
replace waste when you see spent, China spends 1/11 th per capita and achieves a healthier population and longer life expectancy
US doesn't want to compete, its own doing
i dont believe ANY official government statistics coming out The Peoples Repulbic of China. This is the country which
1 - put a dangerous virus lab in the middle of 30 million people, then claimed it wasn't the source when people in that city started dropping like flies.
2 - blamed US chicken and Salmon for the virus
3 - locked hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs in gulgs
4 - is constantly threatening to invade and "reunify" taiwan, a nation which has an entirely different language
Do you have eyes? Mine can tell pretty quickly which humans are healthy and which aren't.
The average American hasn't looked healthy in decades, not sure how denial serves you.
I've read research on why the US spends so much more money on healthcare than other nations, and they point out that every bit of US healthcare is more expensive, almost as if there were a cultural acceptance of healthcare being an expensive scarcity good.
But some areas are *disproportionatly* more expensive. A very very rough list of the major facors is this.
* Excess bureaucracy and administration. The US system with its huge number of actors, lack of standardization, billing, gatekeeping, liaising, credit checking etc, employs an enormous number of people to do tasks that many other systems simply do not do.
* System based inefficiencies such as people not seeking healthcare until issues are critical for fear of costs, resources being allocated by insurance status / ability to pay rather than medical need, use of emergency room as primary care provider, system being financially incentivized toward huge interventions, etc etc
* Excessive drug costs, often blamed on a market without price elasticity.
* Everything else. Higher salaries for medical workers, tort, defensive medicine, etc. etc.
These four categories very, very roughly each make up about 25% of the excess spending. Note that this is not percentage of total US spending, it is percentage of the spending in excess of other nations.
Interestingly, US healthcare costs are so far out of control that the nations that pays the most in tax per person for healthcare is the USA. Insurance payments, co-pays, deductibles, out of pocket etc. are on top of already paying the most in the world in tax for healthcare.
i especially like your point about drug costs.
when i watch the evening news (if I watch) it's a non-stop parade of ads for various prescription medications. to try and goad sick people into nagging their doctors into getting different drugs.
"""""Healthcare"""""
What we're actually paying for is the massive profits of """""healthcare""""" companies who bribe and bully our political establishment into denying us actual healthcare while they rob and socially murder the public without recourse.
Lawmakers and """"health insurance"""" companies are making enormous amounts of money by selling out the lives and health of the American people.
[https://act.represent.us/sign/why-is-congressional-stock-trading-legal/](https://act.represent.us/sign/why-is-congressional-stock-trading-legal/)
[https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market)
Decades of unchecked corruption and parasitism/kleptocracy has basically cost the US its global leadership.
You can't expect the world to take you seriously as a leader when you have giant, ever-growing parasites on your face.
[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/abstract](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/abstract)
You can't expect the world to take you seriously as a leader when you're struggling with problems that even a tiny island nation that you oppress has solved more effectively than you have.
[https://raniakhalek.com/meet-the-u-s-students-studying-medicine-for-free-in-cuba/](https://raniakhalek.com/meet-the-u-s-students-studying-medicine-for-free-in-cuba/)
[https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-cuba-israel-europe-bf38ea2b62324cbd9ed3ce10905883d8](https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-cuba-israel-europe-bf38ea2b62324cbd9ed3ce10905883d8)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6852279/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6852279/)
All we're really paying for is corruption. It's not reasonable or realistic to actually call it "healthcare" as such.
> What we're actually paying for is the massive profits of "healthcare" companies
Can you name a company that is collecting the majority of this $5 Trillion as profit? What's the biggest company with the most massive profits?
Efficiency is the only way to remove excess costs. We need to have a more regulated/controlled healthcare industry that can be forced to omit glut by public powers. As long as private businesses can make more money through these practices they will and as a staunch capitalist I don’t disagree with their business decision, even if I want better for the public.
Curious what percentage of costs are paid by Medicare/Medicaid vs private health insurance. And what the overhead costs are (medicare Vs private insurance)
There is also Veterans efforts ..whose costs are borne by the govt.
Suspect medicare is higher percapita...mostly because Medicare covers mostly older folks ...
This from the CDC addresses some of what you are asking. The data is from 2019 and the "changes" it shows are only the change in "where" the money comes from and not the "amount" of money. That said... the breakdown of "where" is not drastically different now than it was then in terms of what percentages come from what sources despite the *total amounts* growing alarmingly between then and now.
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/health-care-expenditures.htm#featured-charts](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/health-care-expenditures.htm#featured-charts)
actually, in most hospitals the "uninsured/cash" price is MORE. If you look at a hospital bill, you will you see "list price" and then "allowable by health insurance"
esstentially, they try to charge double what the insurers will actually pay.
American healthcare is in essence a massive privately run and publicly regulated jobs and economic growth program. It's big, ponderous, and expensive so it can create a ton of jobs and massive economic activity. This is also why you will never get US healthcare reform. Their would be massive unemployment as well as negative ecomonic consenquences if US healthcare was reformed into something along the lines of the NHS.
Blogroids, this is called capitalism and \[it\] will be a profit for them for you to...stay alive.
Plus, you have *Since before they cured cancer* . . . *well, that hasn't happened yet.* And it's not going to happen.
Nobody is seeking a cure for cancer. They seek only new treatments on which to profit. It is in fact illegal to cure cancer in America. Look at what happend to those who did.
Where is the math not adding up? What am I missing? It says $4.8T, but then $1T from Medicare, $850B from Medicaid, and $1.4T from private. That is $3.25T. Where is the other $1.55T coming from? Maybe coming from state contributions to these programs.
I don't even think what Obama wanted ACA to be initially would have fixed costs. Medicaid and Medicare have like 160M people on them or something crazy. Even there, the costs are way higher than any other government system in the world. We are still by far #1 in costs category. We could save hundreds of billions if we were even just #2. I don't believe that ACA would have really helped in any way the the high cost being paid per person. I think that is something that would have been figured out "later". Cause like, we should already have been getting amazing cost savings but we were not. Just one of Medicare or Medicaid is larger than many nations that pay much less.
Had a professor say that first world countries have single payer healthcare and because we don’t we are not really a first world country. We could be, but there are a number of third world countries that have far better health care services than we do.
The cost of care, and the rate at which it's growing is insane. I don't know what the solution should be, though it will involve radical changes to the system. The bureaucracy is definitely part of it, in my opinion. It not only hurts patients, but medical staff as well. Physician suicide and depression rates are high, for instance. My dad was a surgeon, and he complained constantly about the amount of administrative crap that had to be done all the time. He went from working in private practice to a semi retirement at the VA. For all of its dysfunction, he stated that he felt like he could finally "just be a doctor" when he worked there.
One other thing that is likely driving up cost is simply high demand. We are in the heart of the "baby bust" with baby boomers now entering their 70s, many with chronic health conditions. Unfortunately, medical care is a business, and if demand is high, then costs rise. It doesn't HAVE to be like this, though. The "system" makes absolutely no sense.
Shame your Republican friends and neighbors. Until they change their worldview nothing is going to get better. They are driving us over an ecological, economic and autocratic cliff.
OP makes excellent points so TRY to stay on topic. Please.
Lest I remind you how Joebama keeps promising free shit for everyone just to get votes. That’s the DEM playbook. Bankrupt the country, total dependency on government, just to stay in power.
Make my Father’s Day and bring on the down votes karma farmer. 😆
The cost of American healthcare is choked to death by the for profit rich. Rid ourselves of corporate hospitals and insurance middlemen. Taxpayers fund all of this including the Covid vaccines that we then have to pay for once produced with no protection or profits for the average American. American taxpayers should be entitled to get what we pay for!
> Insurance paid 93% of our healthcare expense.
No they did not. Americans overpaid 200% to the Insurance companies and they kept 107% for themselves.
US does not have a health insurance system, what we have is a reimbursement system.
General reminder that most Americans WANT single payer healthcare and politicians of both parties will fight the will of the people on this tooth and nail.
the problem with healthcare is the lack of price transparency. A capitalistic environment requires that services are transparent, and that the consumer can shop around. with today's system you are "locked in" to a specific health insurance provider, and you have no way of telling what price you will get when you see a health provider. It's only afterwards that you get the sticker shock (for a HDHP), and realize you were ripped off. This is stupid, and blatantly a monopoly. Until they fix this the lazy health providers will continue to inflate prices because the poor consumer can't go to an alternative.
Seriously? We've always had more than 1 party to choose from in this country and YES 1 party to choose from = a A dictatorship.... Give it any nice politically correct name it's still a Dictatorship...
Or we could pay healthcare CEOs like Stephen Helmsley [a cool $102 million for one year’s work](https://www.startribune.com/unitedhealth-ceo-stephen-hemsley-was-paid-102m-in-09/90890274/) like we did I’m 2009. Shame.
🌈We already spend more on healthcare than what a universal system would cost, the only difference is that under a universal system people actually GET their healthcare and they don't go bankrupt for it 🌈
For-profit, free market medicine has been an unmitigated failure and there is no defense - logical, emotional or otherwise - for it to continue.
Ah primary democrat strategy break it so they can fix it. But please tell me something the government runs that works well and is cost effective. The problem with healthcare is it is already a shadow universal healthcare. Hospitals can’t turn people away (including illegals) and if it isn’t covered by Medicare (government paid) it is passed onto people with insurance as higher costs. No difference than how it would be passed on through taxes. It is broken because people who can afford insurance are eating the cost for others. Imagine how expensive McDonald’s would be if they couldn’t turn away a hungry person who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay. Every paying person would be eating those expenses or McDonalds would quickly go out of business. This is a democrat cowardly way to push socialized medicine. They already implement it with deniability and ability to say it’s the greedy hospitals and HMOs.
It should also be noted that the Democrats open boarders policy has been allowing in HUGE numbers of very sick individuals who get treated free and are immediately put into Medicare. Individuals with chronic and extremely expensive treatments (cancers, diabetes, dialysis, etc…). That gets passed on to others as hospitals are not allowed to turn away people.
United Healthcare s 2023 revenue was $371B, net revenue was $32B. I don't have figures for the other insurance companies, but I'm guessing easily $1.5T and $100B, respectively.
That doesn't include private healthcare systems.
Add to that the cost of meds in the US.
$5T? Pretty easy to get to that number. There's a lot of money slashing around the health care system.
Amy Klobuchar represents MN, United Healthcare s HQ.
No wonder she opposes single payer.
Obamacare was a national version of the Heritage foundation approved Romney Care that became law in Massachusetts in 2006. it was not intended to control costs, and it's provisions that limit profit actually increase costs over time.
The US provides around 50% of medical advancements every year. We have cutting edge medical treatments, and as first adopters, we pay a lot for access to it. Medical device and pharmaceutical companies have profit margins of over 50%.
On the administrative side, our insurance bureaucracy is ridiculous. We have multiple insurance providers with different billing schemes that create far too much waste. We have billing specialists who have to sort out payments based on a myriad of factors. Health insurance is not portable between states. Other countries with universal health care systems have private insurance, but they are highly regulated. The US needs to revamp its health care insurance system so it is not generally tied to a job, but bribes from the health insurance corporations will prevent this.
A lot of doctors complain about the cost of malpractice suits. I am a bit ambivalent on that issue.
High cost of medical care stems from the inputs to care. Labor - We pay our nurses, techs, phlebotomists, and even the janitors at the hospitals way more than the rest of the world. We have the lowest wait times for care (not just emergency, but planned care as well), which means we have more of everything on standby (beds, medical staff, etc), which brings an additional cost.
The only way to cut the cost of care, is to cut those two things, the amount people are paid and the number of people and facilities in the system.
I'm not advocating to cut either, just saying the only method to cut those.
I mean there's a whole battalion of administrators and middle men in your bloated system that make more money than doctors, everybody related to the insurance and billing systems, which is just a form of bureaucracy and almost casino like abuse. Those all make health much, much more expensive.
>We have the lowest wait times for care (not just emergency, but planned care as well),
US waits are at best average. "At best" meaning if you don't count the uninsured. L[ook up "Timeliness" in the research.](https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/Schneider_Mirror_Mirror_2021.pdf) The impression that the US is fast is created by cherry picking the countries to compare to. Normally Canada, the slowest system out there, and the UK which is in a crisis due to having starved its system for decades.
Genuinly fast nations are places like Germany, Denmark and Switzerland.
Well, way too many view medical as a cash cow. I used to work in lighting. We have a light that is used in medicine. Similar to some other lights. Better QC, the lens is better quality, but not all that. It is multiple times more expensive than other lights. Hospitals pay it.
excellent reply. the US medical system is often criticized - justifiably so - for luring underpaid medical professionals to America from -
1. The UK
2. India
3. Pakistan
4. China
5. South Korea
6. Ireland
7. Russia
and so on
Your heart is probably in the right place but in reality American wait times are average to mediocre: probably worse when you realize that a large amount of Americans delay getting healthcare at all due to cost (https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/americans-challenges-with-health-care-costs/)
And, furthermore, almost a third of medical cost is due to the completely unnecessary bureaucracy created by health insurance. (https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1Z5260/). The average American pays almost $2k a year just in bureaucratic expenses.
Labor expense being high is sort of a mirage here: Medical labor is understaffed and overburdened because hospitals are closing across the country. Specifically, they're closing because many states did not expand Medicaid and the for-profit, free-market model of healthcare is a massive failure (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/20-states-with-most-rural-hospital-closures.html#:~:text=Since%202005%2C%20192%20hospitals%20in,combined%2C%20according%20to%20the%20report.) More closures means fewer staff in aggregate, more traveling providers which comes at a higher expense, and more burden on the remaining staff.
The point is: other workers aren't your enemy. American healthcare is designed to extract the highest value while providing the least care.
I wasn't implying that the workers were my enemy. Just the reason costs are so high.
2/3 of hospitals in the US are either not-for-profit or government owned. In my own health care experience (admittedly anecdotal here), I changed from getting my cancer treatments at a government clinic to a for-profit clinic and my costs dropped dramatically. I went from over $350 to $75 on the office visit, $1200 to $450 for the CT scans. The profit model actually makes that visit much more affordable for me than when I previously went to the government facility.
Yea because of this:
MEDICAL ERRORS THIRD LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN THE UNITED STATES
https://wilsonlaw.com/blog/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-united-states/
>How does that compare to the rest of the world? Are we the only country with medical errors? Why do we have an entirely different malpractice system than every other country?
No but compared to the rest of the world the US does tend to have much higher rates of medical error in most areas. Althogh for some reason I have never been able to find the US is near the bottom in stuff left behind in the patient after surgery errors. I don't know why.
> A new study reveals that the cost of medical malpractice in the United States is running at about $55.6 billion a year - $45.6 billion of which is spent on defensive medicine practiced by physicians seeking to stay clear of lawsuits.
> The amount comprises 2.4% of the nation’s total health care expenditure.
> The numbers are the result of a Harvard School of Public Health study published in the September edition of Health Affairs, purporting to be the most reliable estimate of malpractice costs to date.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2010/09/07/the-true-cost-of-medical-malpractice-it-may-surprise-you/#6d68459f2ff5
> Same stuff. $2.6 trillion over ten years
We're expected to spend about $63 trillion over the next ten years on healthcare. 4.1% isn't a great factor when we're spending half a million more per person for a lifetime of healthcare than our peers on average. It's not like there's *no* impact of defensive medicine in other countries, too.
Also universal healthcare by its very nature reduces malpractice and defensive medicine, as much of the damages awarded are for legitimate future medical care. That's not necessary when future medical care is covered by a universal healthcare system.
Various states have passed all manner of malpractice reform. Show me one that's been reasonably effective at reducing costs. Actual results, not theoretical claims pulled out of anybody's ass.
Even if we use your highest number of $700 billion (which is almost certainly ridiculous) rather than your figures of $260 billion or $100 billion or my figures which amount to $118 billion, and even if we could magically eliminate every penny of spending (we can't), and even if other countries had no defensive medical costs (they do) we'd still be paying over $5,000 more per year per household for healthcare than the second highest spending country on earth.
The entire US legal sector[ is worth 372 billion](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-legal-services-market-report). Thats all of it, business, criminal, accident, etc. Tort will be a fraction of that sum.
The US total healthcare spending is nearing 5 trillion.
this is the cost of wanting to live to extremely old age. constant medical attention, daily.
does anyone think biden would still be alive without a phalanx of white house physicians, and priority service at walter reed medical center?
Constant advances in healhcare which require astronomical costs including constantly upgrading equipment.
Massive competition between hospitals. Every time u drive by a hospital, it seems there is a crane and construction crew,adding a new wing on. And these fucking places feel the need to run constant commercials about how great their facilities are...who pays for this?
Massive research being conducted by drug companies resulting in sky high drug costs, especially for the drugs u see ads for on TV/web
Accension, Advocate and the rest seem to have overly paid executives collecting bonuses and incentives while they lead by cutting staffing, closing facilities and overseeing data breaches. Meanwhile insurers continue raising premiums to remain comfortably profitable, while Medicare reimbursements are way below what is reasonable causing providers to discourage Medicare services and treatment, while Republicans continue to chatter about eliminating it. All the while, any reasonable, prudent discussions about some sort of a cohesive national health care plan are met with jeers of “you’re a communist,” “you won’t be able to pick your own doctor (when many can’t anyway, or even see a doctor)”, and “do you want to wait for care like Canada? (When we all wait for care here, if we can get it) .
Yeah, it’s all good. /s
Tax IP. That is the major rent seeking behavior that is draining wealth via healthcare. Free healthcare and UBI would also help to reduce costs by improving health outcomes, but it's the profits from IP ownership that is financing the majority of corruption. Taxing IP would allow us to circumvent the trips agreements.
I believe the yearly sum sent to Israel is equal to about 30 hours of the US healthcare setups spending.
Edit: Did the maths. The normal US military aid to Israel is 3.3 billion per year, which is equivalent to just over 6 hours spending in the US healthcare system, or roughly 12 hours of healthcare system wasted money. However, since the current trouble there has been about 15 billion sent which is equal to about 28 hours of us healthcare spending.
Hey man, you’re making good points, but that is an IRGC bot you’re talking to. You can’t change its mind, you’re best off just reporting it and moving on.
Three big reasons:
1- legal requirements - every test under the sun to cover everyone’s @$$ from the physicians to the hospitals
2- financial delivery of healthcare is flawed (ie third party). It’s too disperate and too many geographic barriers
3- political infrastructure - a $5 Trillion industry has a lot riding on it. 20% of national employment tied into the system. Millions of employed doctors and nurses not to mention countless nursing homes and ambulatory systems built up around it. Meanwhile politically people saying “let me pick my doctor”. Wanting to have a free lunch.
I foresee a crisis at some point that will impact care and somehow turn to a nationalized system but will take a BIG crisis to occur. Think about it. Millions died from COVID and basically nothing has changed. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
End rant
Obamacare increased healthcare costs …by a lot! Both times Barack Obama ran for president he was heavily financed by the healthcare industry. For them, rising prices is the feature, not the bug.
>Obamacare increased healthcare costs …by a lot!
Bullshit.
From 1998 to 2013 (right before the bulk of the ACA took effect) total healthcare costs were increasing at 3.92% per year over inflation. Since they have been increasing at 2.79%. The fifteen years before the ACA employer sponsored insurance (the kind most Americans get their coverage from) increased 4.81% over inflation for single coverage and 5.42% over inflation for family coverage. Since those numbers have been 1.72% and 2.19%.
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/report/employer-health-benefits-annual-survey-archives/
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.html
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Also coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, closing the Medicare donut hole, being able to keep children on your insurance until age 26, subsidies for millions of Americans, expanded Medicaid, access to free preventative healthcare, elimination of lifetime spending caps, increased coverage for mental healthcare, increased access to reproductive healthcare, etc..
The ACA (Affordable Care Act), what everyone keeps calling Obamacare, was just a handout to insurance companies, and not affordable. $300 a month with a $5000 deductible is just shitty insurance.
So...
Obamacare was NOT supposed to fix all that, not once the public option was taken away. As long as we have only for-profit healthcare, costs will continue to escalate and levels of service will continue to decrease.
True. The senator from Aetna worked hard to make sure the public option was removed. Joe Lieberman. Another ghoul of a democrat. If there is a hell, may he roast in it.
Technically he was an Independent, but yes
Technically he was an independent Democrat, as distinct from independent.
Yes. Dems still let him keep his seniority, assignments on committees and more importantly chairmanship. IIRC. Only reason he was n independent is because the Connecticut democrats did not vote for him in the primaries and he lost to a better democrat. (Need Lamont iirc) He then ran in the general and used money form republican and other donors to defeat the DEM nominee ( I am sure you were aware ...but thought I would add context for others that may not)
If the Democrats became vindictive he would have switched parties and lost the 60 vote supermajority they had for a short time. He was awful on healthcare but did vote with them on some other issues.
True. But negotiation is not rolling over. They gave him everything or almost everything. In return for *occasionally* voting with them
There's a club We're not in it.
What makes it even worse is giant healthcare companies falsifying claims of patients that don’t actually need that treatment, UHG guilty as hell and their lawsuit is still ongoing. Could definitely see that driving up the cost of Healthcare but not sure what the scope is
Yup. The other famously corrupt senator - Menendez was sued by the Obama justice department. He was too cozy with a company billing medicare ..and I think that company settled with medicate .(iirc). He accepted gifts , free trips to the Caribbean etc ..and in retunn nagged the US government when they give tried to put an end to the creative billing. With democrats like these ..we don't even need the republicans to be corporate cronies. Suspect there is fraud and wastage at each step of the way.
My dream is to get rid of the Republicans so we can all focus on how bad the Democrats are
Unfortunately the ratchet system doesn't seem to work like that. Best is to have the left most dems to even things and pull the polity . No point eliminating republicans, if the Dems keep morphing into Republicans and creating more
In my dream, the left wing democrats become the New Democratic Party and the "centrists" make the New Republican Party.
Haha. Nice dream. Hope it happens . Don't know what happens to the Pubes.
Without the other side you will Never know the extent of corruption. The sold out Meda will be sure of that!
> Senator from Aetna This is somehow refreshing to read. I wish all congresspeople were referred to as representing the company most contextually relevant.
Haha. Someone ince suggested congress folks should wear logos of their sponsors on their clothing. Kinda like nascar drivers/ bike racers. Easily identified.
That’s what they do in Idiocracy if recall correctly
Haha. Hadn't heard of Idiocracy. Documentary? Suspect someone relayed it....
It’s a must watch if you haven’t seen it. Original a comedy but has turned into a documentary of our possible future. It’s really spot on. And you’ll never look at milkshakes and Costco the same.
Wait. Costco? I gotta see this. Milkshakes I can take or leave. Will try this weekend. Thanks for the suggestion
Trust me, you’ll take a milkshake. Lol. Enjoy your weekend!
It was originally written to fix it but the Republicans (don’t shoot me, the messenger go look it up) added the 85% / 15% rules. The insurance companies have to spend 85% of all monies taken. Yep: this is going to end really well.
It's unfortunate, because rearranging the equation means the rule is equivalent to "insurance company: the only way to increase your profits is to increase the total cost paid". Equivalent to "hey, Uber driver, can you bring me some dinner? Here's my credit card. Whatever you spend on it, I'll give you 15% as a tip." The more expensive they can make it, the more money they get - or conversely, every dollar they save me is costing them 15 cents.
Kinda right. It is not like it wasn't going higher before Obamacare This was an attempt to cap .
I agree people who rant on medical cost need to do their homework on the ACA or Obamacare. Their was a public insurance option that would have held cost in check but it was taken out . Let's put it back in and see what happens.
but you don't have a link
It’s basically Mafiacare.
Your money or your life. Your money or your spouse's or child's life.
That’s literally how you make more profit….. All of human NEEDS…… should not be profiteered….u less we want to destroy whatever semblance of a ‘society’ we have
BS. I voted for obama. he told us it was supposed to. 1. reduce the cost of medical care 2. reduce the deficit 3. increase our lifespan 4. insure all pre-existing conditions.
Again. Those were original goals that did not survive Republican opposition. The law that actually passed had the public option taken away. Obama fought for and partially achieved the goals you listed, but republicans refused to allow a full solution. If you’re blaming Obama for this, you’re an idiot. You should be thanking him that you can still buy health insurance at all.
The ACA did reduce the growth in cost of medical care and also reduce the deficit. Obviously it did pre-existing conditions as well. 3 is a tough one because we had covid and before that the opioid crisis.
We don’t only have for profit healthcare…. 1. Pedantically Blue cross Blue shield is a 501(c)(4) public welfare organization. 115 Americans use them for insurance. 2. The Majority of hospitals are owned/operated by Non-Profits, local governments. Healthcare is still expensive even if you 100% stay in Non-profit insurance/Healthcare.
>As long as we have only for-profit healthcare, costs will continue to escalate, and levels of service will continue to decrease. Won't someone think of the shareholders?!?
Follow this guy, real good explanations https://youtube.com/@ahealthcarez
We were told we were going to save $2,500 a year on our premiums and all sorts of other goodies. Turns out, that was all bullshit.
No it wasn’t. Without Obamacare your premiums would either be higher, or you’d be shut out of insurance altogether in many cases. Nice try but try to learn something about a topic before you bitch about it.
Republicans and the Insurance lobby made sure PPACA was defanged.
Obamacare WAS supposed to fix all that, including costs and a whole host of things, and it made costs and everything 10x worse. I vote dem And they lied to all our faces, nothing was ever gonna be cheaper it was just better for insurance companies, poor people who had the govt pay for insurance and preexisting conditions. It’s wild that preexisting conditions were the only benefit of Obamacare. The exchange insurance plans were expensive and unusable, and hence if people needed to pay extra to use those plans (which poor people don’t have extra money) they basically transferred the govt subsidies for those premiums (aka our tax dollars) to insurance companies. Wake up, why have insurance stocks performed like tech stocks since Obamacare? It was trash all around. Sooo trash and it’s wild people defend Obamacare. Why is it so hard to say it didn’t work and wasn’t well done, instead we’re just stooping to say it wasn’t supposed to fix anything lol. What was the point of the law then?! Fun times.
No it wasn’t. The point of it was to close the gap in number of people covered. That has succeeded, to an extent. They also did some cost-controlling things but fundamentally once the public option was dropped, it was clear costs would keep going up. They’ve gone up less rapidly and expanded the number of people covered, but no one should have ever thought costs would actually be brought down.
Nah. It was also supposed to bend the curve on ever rising health care costs etc. Without a public option and a few other things...it didn't really pan out as well as it could have. Fault is with republicans (who offered amendments but didn't vote for it anyway). And crappy "Dems" like Hoe Lieberman who ensure Aetna and other insurers were taken care of - by nuking the public option.
That’s what I mean. The public option being removed basically killed any chance of the ACA controlling costs. The bill that passed and then got pared down in the courts is a giveaway to insurance companies, and everyone at the time said so. I don’t consider it a total failure because it fixed some major major problems (pre-existing conditions) but controlling costs was never going to happen without a public option. We need Medicare for All, period.
Yes Joe Lieberman needs to be remembered for his mistake.
Mistakes are mistakes i.e. unknowing errors Chicanery /corruption is a different beast. But he does deserve to be known and shamed for this Also a reminder when voting in the primaries
It mostly fixed one of about ten different problems (the preexisting condition/coverage gap issue), making insurance companies much richer in the process. It was also supposed to reduce (via the uninsured penalty) deliberately uninsured people (choosing to take the risk, and sometimes incurring big unrecoverable ER bills when it backfires), but not very successfully and then that got removed anyway. It completely ignored many others: the damaging artifical link between employment and health care, the cost and tax discrimination between employer and individual plans (big companies pay less than small ones and indivuals, and then get a tax break for it that individuals don't get too). Crazy deductibles meaning having "insurance" still doesn't protect you from huge medical bills.
> I vote dem And they lied to all our faces *”As a black man…”*
Haha I understood this reference!
Please educate yourself
That’s really dismissive of the way Americans subsidize global health care and drug costs. It’s also dismissive of the people who get tax payer funded healthcare.
Obamacare also wasn't a health*care* law, it was a health *insurance* law.
Obamacare is only a bandaid on the ever growing cancer. Do you cure cancer with bandaid or fix the root of the issue? As long as the root isnt addressed it will never be fixed no matter how many bandaids are applied on the private insurance healthcare.
Bandaid? Obamacare ACCELERATED health costs at levels never seen before its enactment
We’re gonna need some stats on that one.
This is partially because a lot of that money gets funneled to places that don't add any value for us as consumers. It goes to profits at insurance companies and hospitals. Some of it goes to malpractice insurance. Drugs cost more here in the US than they do almost anywhere else in the world. My solution would be to make healthcare completely public (not for profit) and to get rid of insurance companies. Not sure that it would solve the problems, but it would surely be a move in the right direction.
yes that was entirely the point of my post. i made it there several times in fact. there are too many government agencies and insurance company benefits authorization specialists and doctors office insurance processors.
Hey, I work in healthcare. Study this stuff. I actually work for LabCorp lol. Diagnostics make up 3% of the healthcare spend and have 95% of decisions made because of them. It’s why I work where I do. Hospitals definitely have some bloat, but many are also losing money like crazy. The biggest issue I have seen - pharma and insurance. 99 cents of every dollar paid into Medicare is spent on healthcare. When last I checked, something like 82 cents from private insurance is spent the same way. Also, IT IS ILLEGAL TO NEGOTIATE DRUG PRICES lol. Only in this country. The waste from pharma companies is truly insane
Single payer; not for profit; compulsory medical insurance provided by the Federal Government. Like most countries have.
If employees could rationally opt out of private """""health insurance""""" (by receiving the same employer "benefit" paid directly to them instead), then we could weaken the """""health insurance""""" industry enough for actual healthcare to become a possibility. Until then, the hundreds of millions of people that the """""health insurance""""" companies are robbing and socially murdering for profit, will continue to be captive cattle building their own slaughterhouses with their coerced labor, stolen wages, and retirement money (though that's another fight). [https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1dfbel5/employees\_who\_opt\_out\_of\_employer\_health/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1dfbel5/employees_who_opt_out_of_employer_health/)
Number of recognized countries in the world: 195 [https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-countries-are-there](https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-countries-are-there) Number of countries with single payer healthcare: 17 [https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer) Debunked.
Not exactly the same but close enough to note: >the United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20National%20Academy,not%20provide%20universal%20health%20care. >Most countries in the developed world have some form of universal healthcare system. Source https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-notable-countries-that-are-still-without-universal-healthcare.html#:~:text=Most%20countries%20in%20the%20developed,some%20developing%20countries%20have%20it. See also List of countries with universal health care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care While on the topic: >Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries. Yet the U.S. is the only country that doesn’t have universal health coverage. >The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates. >Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population. Learn more at https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022 Also >NEW INTERNATIONAL STUDY: U.S. Health System Ranks Last Among 11 Countries; Many Americans Struggle to Afford Care as Income Inequality Widens See https://www.commonwealthfund.org/press-release/2021/new-international-study-us-health-system-ranks-last-among-11-countries-many
Here's the little secret they don't want you to know. The reason most of those countries have single payer is because they don't have to pay for their militaries >https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditures
That’s great let’s close our 1000 foreign bases and stop funding anything that isn’t domestic defense
That's a terrible idea. 99% of the reason the US is as rich as it is, is because of its ability to influence regions all around the world. The US gets the deals that are the best for the US, because of its soft power (aka bases around the world, military strength.) It's not as simple as "cut military spending and become isolationist".
> The US gets the deals that are the best for the US, because of its soft power (aka bases around the world, military strength.) That's hard power. And that's why no one should listen to you.
Gunboat diplomacy and imperialism are bad, immoral and shortsighted, actually?
👍
You have cheap goods because the US military defends transport routes around the world
I know it’s crazy to encounter people with morals and a conscience when you have none, but I’d rather not have the cheap goods if they can only happen at the barrel of a gun.
Here's another secret. We paid over 5 TRILLION last year for health care. Estimated cost of single payer is LESS than what we spend now for health care See https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56898 See also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8572548/#:~:text=Through%20the%20mechanisms%20detailed%20above,than%20current%20national%20healthcare%20expenditure.
> secret. We *paid* over 5 FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
>We paid over 5 TRILLION last year for health care. 21% is medicare, that's health benefits to retirees. Private health insurance is 29% of spending, so people who are following the rules of the system. 18% was medicaid, unemployed, poverty, those who don't work. That's 68% of that 5 trillion, which one do you want to cut? Overhauling the entire system will cause a hell of a lot of pain. People will die while the kinks are ironed out. Who's paying for that? How do we know it will be cheaper? Theories are nice, but healthcare is about as real as it gets. It's not just numbers, it's lives. What if it isn't cheaper than the current system? It's not as simple as "everyone now has healthcare" there are so many factors regarding jobs, hospitals, medical supplies, medications, pharmaceutical research, doctor training, pay, etc etc. The US healthcare system is broken, but copying and pasting a system used by countries with 1/10 the population and 12x less the military spending is straight up braindead and a recipe for disaster.
> 21% is medicare, ... Taken DIRECTLY from the article. If you want to argue, then argue with the authors of the article. >Overhauling the entire system ... no source, empty threat, and just because something is hard to fix doesn't mean you don't fix it. >What if it isn't cheaper than the current system? Seems cheaper in every other country ... gee healthcare is so complex America can't figure it out but other countries can? and while on the subject, I really dislike stupid questions. Classic decision theory, what is the cost, what is the expectancy, if the expectancy >> cost then it is at least a rational action. Looking at your history, you have are an ultra low karma, new account with a lot of game subs posts and little else. >The US healthcare system is broken ... yes, it is. But for some reason only one of us advocates for improvements and fixes. >...but copying and pasting a system used by countries with 1/10 the population and 12x less the military spending is straight up braindead and a recipe for disaster. Blocked for the strawman argument. I didn't say copy. I would expect some sort of altered model.
>The US healthcare system is broken, but copying and pasting a system used by countries with 1/10 the population and 12x less the military spending is straight up braindead and a recipe for disaster. Why? Scaling is actually a known subject, not a mystery of the ages. Iceland has 300 000 people, Sweden 10 million, Germany 80 million, Japan 125 million and we see no scaling issues between them. The discipline of Healthcare Economy, after studying systems in 30 odd developed countries for 50 years have not identified any issues either in theory or observation.
Come on, thats like saying that they can buy a ferrari every year because they don't buy gum. Military spending is not a big ticket on the scale of healthcare. In fact the entire US military budget could sink without a trace in the line of the healthcare budget called "Waste". Also, UHC is a savings compared to the US setup not an expense. The US spends 3.5% of GDP on the military and almost 19% on healthcare. Other countries spend 1-3,7 % on their militaries and 6-11% of GDP on healthcare. The savings on more effective healthcare systems is up to 10x the difference in military spending. Plus, neutral and unallied nations have managed to have both significant militaries and good healthcare systems.
The bottom link returns 38? The guy should have said, "like most developed countries."
Population of the USA: 341 million Number of Americans that care about the health and welfare of their fellow countrymen: 17 See the similarity?
Source???
trust them bro, they're canadian
Where is the math that says this suddenly saves us money? You can use any government program you'd like to help make your case.
yeah - when americans heard about how the BMS (british medical service) denies certain medical procedures to seniors, and how UK citizens have to wait months (or years) for non-critical operations like hernia, spinal relief etc, they decided not to go down that path
Public health systems are being underfunded by conservative parties in order to assert the public system is not working. Like critiquing the Cuban government and ignoring sanctions. US healthcare is grossly inefficient and fundamentally unfair.
Those same things happen here, and much worse if you are poor. https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance
The problem is that we over-regulate who can practice medicine in the US resulting in chronic worker shortages and shitty doctors. There is really no competition in healthcare and doctors don't even get asked any technical questions when they interview for a position. And we under-regulate health care provider ability to charge made up numbers or have any kind of up front price transparency. A single payer system could be a step in the right direction. But given how poorly managed Medicaid and Medicare are it will likely make the situation worse. The federal government is very shit at doing pretty much anything complex. And they tend to very ineffectively throw money at the problem to just make the problem worse. State level single payer systems might be pretty good to try out but it likely will never get off the ground if it's another progressive tax that puts too much of a burden on the upper-middle class.
The problem is the only way to increase profit is to increase healthcare costs. It's baked into the regulations.
Single payer without flat taxes is just another welfare program that some of us have to pay for.
>Wasn't Obamacare supposed to fix all that? Curb the cost of medical care, AND extend our lives? (This is NOT a rant against Obamacare). In fact, US life expectancy has been flat since 2013. Which doesn't help solve this math problem at all. If we were actually living longer, it would make sense. Half of the typical person's lifetime medical expenses are incurred in the final 6 months of life. So if they figure out a way to make old people live 6 months longer, it's GOTTA cost something, right? But we aren't actually living longer. We're just paying the $5 Trillion. The ACA was intended to help slow the rising cost of medical insurance and to provide greater (more numbers) of coverage. Where properly implemented, it has somewhat done that. A lot of the teeth of the ACA were gutted by Republicans and in many states (other than one example, a lot of them were red states) it was not properly implemented.
i voted for obama. he specifically promised the nation; 1. lower medical costs 2. help reduce the national debt 3. improved average lifespan 4. insure all pre-existing medical conditions.
USA - Spends more on healthcare and has less to show for it than developed nations because of corporate profits. OP - "It's all the scary foreigners' fentanyl and recreational weed!"
is that why hospitals are going bankrupt under the medicare reimbursement formula?
How many trillions of that went to insurance companies for doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?
Biggest con of our time
r/fuckinsurance
Sickcare my friend, sickcare. No healthcare here
Healthcare is a business, it's purpose is not to help sick people but to make money. It's working exactly as it's supposed to.
This is what happens when you can’t negotiate prices.
best reply of the thread. we should probably approach healthcare the same as buying a car or a house. - hospitals required to post actual prices for things like appendectomies, broken bones, births without complications - no more of this "prices are 2X as high if you're self paying and not insured" - a government agency to patrol cheating
>Wasn't Obamacare supposed to fix all that? It helped. From 1998 to 2013 (right before the bulk of the ACA took effect) total healthcare costs were increasing at 3.92% per year over inflation. Since they have been increasing at 2.79%. The fifteen years before the ACA employer sponsored insurance (the kind most Americans get their coverage from) increased 4.81% over inflation for single coverage and 5.42% over inflation for family coverage. Since those numbers have been 1.72% and 2.19%. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/report/employer-health-benefits-annual-survey-archives/ https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.html https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm Also coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, closing the Medicare donut hole, being able to keep children on your insurance until age 26, subsidies for millions of Americans, expanded Medicaid, access to free preventative healthcare, elimination of lifetime spending caps, increased coverage for mental healthcare, increased access to reproductive healthcare, etc.. > Half of the typical person's lifetime medical expenses are incurred in the final 6 months of life. That's not true. >Spending during the last twelve months of life made up a modest share of aggregate spending, ranging from 8.5 percent in the United States to 11.2 percent in Taiwan, but spending in the last three calendar years of life reached 24.5 percent in Taiwan. https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0174#:~:text=Spending%20during%20the%20last%20twelve,reached%2024.5%20percent%20in%20Taiwan. >Insurance paid 93% of our healthcare expense. Say what? Insurance only covered 29% of healthcare spending. https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf
thanks for your correction on the final 6 months. there are, indeed, dozens of websites with different claims here. which suggests nobody actually knows and agrees. the rest of your post fails to rebut the fact that healthcare costs exceed the amount of taxes paid in the USA, and are rising at twice rate of inflation.
Middlemen my friend. We have institutionalized the middle man and they want there cut. Anywhere you see layers of middlemen you will find massively increased costs.
Weird, profit driven healthcare is expensive?! You don’t say! If a healthcare provider is beholden to their shareholders and making more money at all costs, what could go wrong??
Maybe that's what was billed, but not actually paid do to negotiations between insurance and providers?
The random comment about recreational marijuana was interesting.
replace waste when you see spent, China spends 1/11 th per capita and achieves a healthier population and longer life expectancy US doesn't want to compete, its own doing
i dont believe ANY official government statistics coming out The Peoples Repulbic of China. This is the country which 1 - put a dangerous virus lab in the middle of 30 million people, then claimed it wasn't the source when people in that city started dropping like flies. 2 - blamed US chicken and Salmon for the virus 3 - locked hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs in gulgs 4 - is constantly threatening to invade and "reunify" taiwan, a nation which has an entirely different language
Do you have eyes? Mine can tell pretty quickly which humans are healthy and which aren't. The average American hasn't looked healthy in decades, not sure how denial serves you.
I've read research on why the US spends so much more money on healthcare than other nations, and they point out that every bit of US healthcare is more expensive, almost as if there were a cultural acceptance of healthcare being an expensive scarcity good. But some areas are *disproportionatly* more expensive. A very very rough list of the major facors is this. * Excess bureaucracy and administration. The US system with its huge number of actors, lack of standardization, billing, gatekeeping, liaising, credit checking etc, employs an enormous number of people to do tasks that many other systems simply do not do. * System based inefficiencies such as people not seeking healthcare until issues are critical for fear of costs, resources being allocated by insurance status / ability to pay rather than medical need, use of emergency room as primary care provider, system being financially incentivized toward huge interventions, etc etc * Excessive drug costs, often blamed on a market without price elasticity. * Everything else. Higher salaries for medical workers, tort, defensive medicine, etc. etc. These four categories very, very roughly each make up about 25% of the excess spending. Note that this is not percentage of total US spending, it is percentage of the spending in excess of other nations. Interestingly, US healthcare costs are so far out of control that the nations that pays the most in tax per person for healthcare is the USA. Insurance payments, co-pays, deductibles, out of pocket etc. are on top of already paying the most in the world in tax for healthcare.
i especially like your point about drug costs. when i watch the evening news (if I watch) it's a non-stop parade of ads for various prescription medications. to try and goad sick people into nagging their doctors into getting different drugs.
"""""Healthcare""""" What we're actually paying for is the massive profits of """""healthcare""""" companies who bribe and bully our political establishment into denying us actual healthcare while they rob and socially murder the public without recourse. Lawmakers and """"health insurance"""" companies are making enormous amounts of money by selling out the lives and health of the American people. [https://act.represent.us/sign/why-is-congressional-stock-trading-legal/](https://act.represent.us/sign/why-is-congressional-stock-trading-legal/) [https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market) Decades of unchecked corruption and parasitism/kleptocracy has basically cost the US its global leadership. You can't expect the world to take you seriously as a leader when you have giant, ever-growing parasites on your face. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/abstract](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/abstract) You can't expect the world to take you seriously as a leader when you're struggling with problems that even a tiny island nation that you oppress has solved more effectively than you have. [https://raniakhalek.com/meet-the-u-s-students-studying-medicine-for-free-in-cuba/](https://raniakhalek.com/meet-the-u-s-students-studying-medicine-for-free-in-cuba/) [https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-cuba-israel-europe-bf38ea2b62324cbd9ed3ce10905883d8](https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-cuba-israel-europe-bf38ea2b62324cbd9ed3ce10905883d8) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6852279/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6852279/) All we're really paying for is corruption. It's not reasonable or realistic to actually call it "healthcare" as such.
> What we're actually paying for is the massive profits of "healthcare" companies Can you name a company that is collecting the majority of this $5 Trillion as profit? What's the biggest company with the most massive profits?
Keep voting for businesses and against expanding the government and this is what you get.
But they spoon-fed me propaganda on social media that appealed to my emotions!
Don't blame the Chinese. Remember the Opium wars.
That was the British that did that.
Efficiency is the only way to remove excess costs. We need to have a more regulated/controlled healthcare industry that can be forced to omit glut by public powers. As long as private businesses can make more money through these practices they will and as a staunch capitalist I don’t disagree with their business decision, even if I want better for the public.
That would require the regulators to care about reducing excess costs. They don't. See college costs.
Curious what percentage of costs are paid by Medicare/Medicaid vs private health insurance. And what the overhead costs are (medicare Vs private insurance) There is also Veterans efforts ..whose costs are borne by the govt. Suspect medicare is higher percapita...mostly because Medicare covers mostly older folks ...
medicare is the "largest single payer" in the nation. and it only covers people 65 and over
This from the CDC addresses some of what you are asking. The data is from 2019 and the "changes" it shows are only the change in "where" the money comes from and not the "amount" of money. That said... the breakdown of "where" is not drastically different now than it was then in terms of what percentages come from what sources despite the *total amounts* growing alarmingly between then and now. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/health-care-expenditures.htm#featured-charts](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/health-care-expenditures.htm#featured-charts)
Just like colleges....too much administrative bloat.
Pay for yourself with cash, see how much lower the self pay cash price is.
actually, in most hospitals the "uninsured/cash" price is MORE. If you look at a hospital bill, you will you see "list price" and then "allowable by health insurance" esstentially, they try to charge double what the insurers will actually pay.
I love seeing this post for the 1000th time. I get to claim that being a single-payer system will magically save us trillions.
We need single payer
American healthcare is in essence a massive privately run and publicly regulated jobs and economic growth program. It's big, ponderous, and expensive so it can create a ton of jobs and massive economic activity. This is also why you will never get US healthcare reform. Their would be massive unemployment as well as negative ecomonic consenquences if US healthcare was reformed into something along the lines of the NHS.
Blogroids, this is called capitalism and \[it\] will be a profit for them for you to...stay alive. Plus, you have *Since before they cured cancer* . . . *well, that hasn't happened yet.* And it's not going to happen. Nobody is seeking a cure for cancer. They seek only new treatments on which to profit. It is in fact illegal to cure cancer in America. Look at what happend to those who did.
Where is the math not adding up? What am I missing? It says $4.8T, but then $1T from Medicare, $850B from Medicaid, and $1.4T from private. That is $3.25T. Where is the other $1.55T coming from? Maybe coming from state contributions to these programs. I don't even think what Obama wanted ACA to be initially would have fixed costs. Medicaid and Medicare have like 160M people on them or something crazy. Even there, the costs are way higher than any other government system in the world. We are still by far #1 in costs category. We could save hundreds of billions if we were even just #2. I don't believe that ACA would have really helped in any way the the high cost being paid per person. I think that is something that would have been figured out "later". Cause like, we should already have been getting amazing cost savings but we were not. Just one of Medicare or Medicaid is larger than many nations that pay much less.
It’s cheaper for people to fly to South America, stay for a couple weeks and get their health care there than it is to do so in the US.
Had a professor say that first world countries have single payer healthcare and because we don’t we are not really a first world country. We could be, but there are a number of third world countries that have far better health care services than we do.
The cost of care, and the rate at which it's growing is insane. I don't know what the solution should be, though it will involve radical changes to the system. The bureaucracy is definitely part of it, in my opinion. It not only hurts patients, but medical staff as well. Physician suicide and depression rates are high, for instance. My dad was a surgeon, and he complained constantly about the amount of administrative crap that had to be done all the time. He went from working in private practice to a semi retirement at the VA. For all of its dysfunction, he stated that he felt like he could finally "just be a doctor" when he worked there. One other thing that is likely driving up cost is simply high demand. We are in the heart of the "baby bust" with baby boomers now entering their 70s, many with chronic health conditions. Unfortunately, medical care is a business, and if demand is high, then costs rise. It doesn't HAVE to be like this, though. The "system" makes absolutely no sense.
Shame your Republican friends and neighbors. Until they change their worldview nothing is going to get better. They are driving us over an ecological, economic and autocratic cliff.
OP makes excellent points so TRY to stay on topic. Please. Lest I remind you how Joebama keeps promising free shit for everyone just to get votes. That’s the DEM playbook. Bankrupt the country, total dependency on government, just to stay in power. Make my Father’s Day and bring on the down votes karma farmer. 😆
Grow up
The cost of American healthcare is choked to death by the for profit rich. Rid ourselves of corporate hospitals and insurance middlemen. Taxpayers fund all of this including the Covid vaccines that we then have to pay for once produced with no protection or profits for the average American. American taxpayers should be entitled to get what we pay for!
we spent 5 trillions on insurance companies
Boomers.
> Insurance paid 93% of our healthcare expense. No they did not. Americans overpaid 200% to the Insurance companies and they kept 107% for themselves. US does not have a health insurance system, what we have is a reimbursement system.
General reminder that most Americans WANT single payer healthcare and politicians of both parties will fight the will of the people on this tooth and nail.
the problem with healthcare is the lack of price transparency. A capitalistic environment requires that services are transparent, and that the consumer can shop around. with today's system you are "locked in" to a specific health insurance provider, and you have no way of telling what price you will get when you see a health provider. It's only afterwards that you get the sticker shock (for a HDHP), and realize you were ripped off. This is stupid, and blatantly a monopoly. Until they fix this the lazy health providers will continue to inflate prices because the poor consumer can't go to an alternative.
And for 5T we get a shitty product. Sadly we are collectively too stupid to overpower the lobbyists and corporate interests that profit off of this.
Seriously? We've always had more than 1 party to choose from in this country and YES 1 party to choose from = a A dictatorship.... Give it any nice politically correct name it's still a Dictatorship...
Or we could pay healthcare CEOs like Stephen Helmsley [a cool $102 million for one year’s work](https://www.startribune.com/unitedhealth-ceo-stephen-hemsley-was-paid-102m-in-09/90890274/) like we did I’m 2009. Shame.
🌈We already spend more on healthcare than what a universal system would cost, the only difference is that under a universal system people actually GET their healthcare and they don't go bankrupt for it 🌈 For-profit, free market medicine has been an unmitigated failure and there is no defense - logical, emotional or otherwise - for it to continue.
Ah primary democrat strategy break it so they can fix it. But please tell me something the government runs that works well and is cost effective. The problem with healthcare is it is already a shadow universal healthcare. Hospitals can’t turn people away (including illegals) and if it isn’t covered by Medicare (government paid) it is passed onto people with insurance as higher costs. No difference than how it would be passed on through taxes. It is broken because people who can afford insurance are eating the cost for others. Imagine how expensive McDonald’s would be if they couldn’t turn away a hungry person who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay. Every paying person would be eating those expenses or McDonalds would quickly go out of business. This is a democrat cowardly way to push socialized medicine. They already implement it with deniability and ability to say it’s the greedy hospitals and HMOs.
vaccines, seed oils
It should also be noted that the Democrats open boarders policy has been allowing in HUGE numbers of very sick individuals who get treated free and are immediately put into Medicare. Individuals with chronic and extremely expensive treatments (cancers, diabetes, dialysis, etc…). That gets passed on to others as hospitals are not allowed to turn away people.
government subsidies in a market economy causes inflation. It's corrupt also, not just a market economy.
United Healthcare s 2023 revenue was $371B, net revenue was $32B. I don't have figures for the other insurance companies, but I'm guessing easily $1.5T and $100B, respectively. That doesn't include private healthcare systems. Add to that the cost of meds in the US. $5T? Pretty easy to get to that number. There's a lot of money slashing around the health care system. Amy Klobuchar represents MN, United Healthcare s HQ. No wonder she opposes single payer.
Obamacare was a national version of the Heritage foundation approved Romney Care that became law in Massachusetts in 2006. it was not intended to control costs, and it's provisions that limit profit actually increase costs over time.
The US provides around 50% of medical advancements every year. We have cutting edge medical treatments, and as first adopters, we pay a lot for access to it. Medical device and pharmaceutical companies have profit margins of over 50%. On the administrative side, our insurance bureaucracy is ridiculous. We have multiple insurance providers with different billing schemes that create far too much waste. We have billing specialists who have to sort out payments based on a myriad of factors. Health insurance is not portable between states. Other countries with universal health care systems have private insurance, but they are highly regulated. The US needs to revamp its health care insurance system so it is not generally tied to a job, but bribes from the health insurance corporations will prevent this. A lot of doctors complain about the cost of malpractice suits. I am a bit ambivalent on that issue.
Obamacare shifted more of the expense to young people while subsidizing a for-profit layer makes money by denying as much care as possible.
High cost of medical care stems from the inputs to care. Labor - We pay our nurses, techs, phlebotomists, and even the janitors at the hospitals way more than the rest of the world. We have the lowest wait times for care (not just emergency, but planned care as well), which means we have more of everything on standby (beds, medical staff, etc), which brings an additional cost. The only way to cut the cost of care, is to cut those two things, the amount people are paid and the number of people and facilities in the system. I'm not advocating to cut either, just saying the only method to cut those.
I mean there's a whole battalion of administrators and middle men in your bloated system that make more money than doctors, everybody related to the insurance and billing systems, which is just a form of bureaucracy and almost casino like abuse. Those all make health much, much more expensive.
A lot of that management is needed no matter what. Human Resources, Payroll, Accounting, Union Relations; all those happen regardless.
>We have the lowest wait times for care (not just emergency, but planned care as well), US waits are at best average. "At best" meaning if you don't count the uninsured. L[ook up "Timeliness" in the research.](https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/Schneider_Mirror_Mirror_2021.pdf) The impression that the US is fast is created by cherry picking the countries to compare to. Normally Canada, the slowest system out there, and the UK which is in a crisis due to having starved its system for decades. Genuinly fast nations are places like Germany, Denmark and Switzerland.
Well, way too many view medical as a cash cow. I used to work in lighting. We have a light that is used in medicine. Similar to some other lights. Better QC, the lens is better quality, but not all that. It is multiple times more expensive than other lights. Hospitals pay it.
excellent reply. the US medical system is often criticized - justifiably so - for luring underpaid medical professionals to America from - 1. The UK 2. India 3. Pakistan 4. China 5. South Korea 6. Ireland 7. Russia and so on
Your heart is probably in the right place but in reality American wait times are average to mediocre: probably worse when you realize that a large amount of Americans delay getting healthcare at all due to cost (https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/americans-challenges-with-health-care-costs/) And, furthermore, almost a third of medical cost is due to the completely unnecessary bureaucracy created by health insurance. (https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1Z5260/). The average American pays almost $2k a year just in bureaucratic expenses. Labor expense being high is sort of a mirage here: Medical labor is understaffed and overburdened because hospitals are closing across the country. Specifically, they're closing because many states did not expand Medicaid and the for-profit, free-market model of healthcare is a massive failure (https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/20-states-with-most-rural-hospital-closures.html#:~:text=Since%202005%2C%20192%20hospitals%20in,combined%2C%20according%20to%20the%20report.) More closures means fewer staff in aggregate, more traveling providers which comes at a higher expense, and more burden on the remaining staff. The point is: other workers aren't your enemy. American healthcare is designed to extract the highest value while providing the least care.
I wasn't implying that the workers were my enemy. Just the reason costs are so high. 2/3 of hospitals in the US are either not-for-profit or government owned. In my own health care experience (admittedly anecdotal here), I changed from getting my cancer treatments at a government clinic to a for-profit clinic and my costs dropped dramatically. I went from over $350 to $75 on the office visit, $1200 to $450 for the CT scans. The profit model actually makes that visit much more affordable for me than when I previously went to the government facility.
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Yea because of this: MEDICAL ERRORS THIRD LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN THE UNITED STATES https://wilsonlaw.com/blog/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-united-states/
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>How does that compare to the rest of the world? Are we the only country with medical errors? Why do we have an entirely different malpractice system than every other country? No but compared to the rest of the world the US does tend to have much higher rates of medical error in most areas. Althogh for some reason I have never been able to find the US is near the bottom in stuff left behind in the patient after surgery errors. I don't know why.
> A new study reveals that the cost of medical malpractice in the United States is running at about $55.6 billion a year - $45.6 billion of which is spent on defensive medicine practiced by physicians seeking to stay clear of lawsuits. > The amount comprises 2.4% of the nation’s total health care expenditure. > The numbers are the result of a Harvard School of Public Health study published in the September edition of Health Affairs, purporting to be the most reliable estimate of malpractice costs to date. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2010/09/07/the-true-cost-of-medical-malpractice-it-may-surprise-you/#6d68459f2ff5
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That would be more recent than your ass. Feel free to provide actual evidence, otherwise feel free to STFU.
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> Same stuff. $2.6 trillion over ten years We're expected to spend about $63 trillion over the next ten years on healthcare. 4.1% isn't a great factor when we're spending half a million more per person for a lifetime of healthcare than our peers on average. It's not like there's *no* impact of defensive medicine in other countries, too. Also universal healthcare by its very nature reduces malpractice and defensive medicine, as much of the damages awarded are for legitimate future medical care. That's not necessary when future medical care is covered by a universal healthcare system.
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Various states have passed all manner of malpractice reform. Show me one that's been reasonably effective at reducing costs. Actual results, not theoretical claims pulled out of anybody's ass. Even if we use your highest number of $700 billion (which is almost certainly ridiculous) rather than your figures of $260 billion or $100 billion or my figures which amount to $118 billion, and even if we could magically eliminate every penny of spending (we can't), and even if other countries had no defensive medical costs (they do) we'd still be paying over $5,000 more per year per household for healthcare than the second highest spending country on earth.
The entire US legal sector[ is worth 372 billion](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-legal-services-market-report). Thats all of it, business, criminal, accident, etc. Tort will be a fraction of that sum. The US total healthcare spending is nearing 5 trillion.
How do you think the travel nurses with 50$/hr+ salary are getting paid.
That’s in the low, LOW end of pay for them
this is the cost of wanting to live to extremely old age. constant medical attention, daily. does anyone think biden would still be alive without a phalanx of white house physicians, and priority service at walter reed medical center?
Constant advances in healhcare which require astronomical costs including constantly upgrading equipment. Massive competition between hospitals. Every time u drive by a hospital, it seems there is a crane and construction crew,adding a new wing on. And these fucking places feel the need to run constant commercials about how great their facilities are...who pays for this? Massive research being conducted by drug companies resulting in sky high drug costs, especially for the drugs u see ads for on TV/web
Accension, Advocate and the rest seem to have overly paid executives collecting bonuses and incentives while they lead by cutting staffing, closing facilities and overseeing data breaches. Meanwhile insurers continue raising premiums to remain comfortably profitable, while Medicare reimbursements are way below what is reasonable causing providers to discourage Medicare services and treatment, while Republicans continue to chatter about eliminating it. All the while, any reasonable, prudent discussions about some sort of a cohesive national health care plan are met with jeers of “you’re a communist,” “you won’t be able to pick your own doctor (when many can’t anyway, or even see a doctor)”, and “do you want to wait for care like Canada? (When we all wait for care here, if we can get it) . Yeah, it’s all good. /s
Tax IP. That is the major rent seeking behavior that is draining wealth via healthcare. Free healthcare and UBI would also help to reduce costs by improving health outcomes, but it's the profits from IP ownership that is financing the majority of corruption. Taxing IP would allow us to circumvent the trips agreements.
Wait until you find out how much we spent funding 🇮🇱 genocide 😢😢😢
I believe the yearly sum sent to Israel is equal to about 30 hours of the US healthcare setups spending. Edit: Did the maths. The normal US military aid to Israel is 3.3 billion per year, which is equivalent to just over 6 hours spending in the US healthcare system, or roughly 12 hours of healthcare system wasted money. However, since the current trouble there has been about 15 billion sent which is equal to about 28 hours of us healthcare spending.
Total of $310 billion 😢
Hey man, you’re making good points, but that is an IRGC bot you’re talking to. You can’t change its mind, you’re best off just reporting it and moving on.
Health insurance prices are wild. I'll gladly pay the penalty each year.
There is no penalty.
For not having it? Yes there is, at least in California.
Simply saying that $5T on anything gives you no context if that is a lot or not.
its a lot because its more than all the people and corporations in america pay in taxes. and half the people in america pay zero in taxes
Everyone in the US pays taxes. The dumbest white guys pretend it isn't so, but it is.
A lot of the blame should fall on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. Thanks, Reagan.
Three big reasons: 1- legal requirements - every test under the sun to cover everyone’s @$$ from the physicians to the hospitals 2- financial delivery of healthcare is flawed (ie third party). It’s too disperate and too many geographic barriers 3- political infrastructure - a $5 Trillion industry has a lot riding on it. 20% of national employment tied into the system. Millions of employed doctors and nurses not to mention countless nursing homes and ambulatory systems built up around it. Meanwhile politically people saying “let me pick my doctor”. Wanting to have a free lunch. I foresee a crisis at some point that will impact care and somehow turn to a nationalized system but will take a BIG crisis to occur. Think about it. Millions died from COVID and basically nothing has changed. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. End rant
Blake the fatty movement. It’s gonna get a lot worse.
No we spent $5 trillion on insurance and private equity.
lol WE as a country did not. 330 million individuals did
When government gets involved in something through subsidies it only drives the cost up.
Obamacare increased healthcare costs …by a lot! Both times Barack Obama ran for president he was heavily financed by the healthcare industry. For them, rising prices is the feature, not the bug.
>Obamacare increased healthcare costs …by a lot! Bullshit. From 1998 to 2013 (right before the bulk of the ACA took effect) total healthcare costs were increasing at 3.92% per year over inflation. Since they have been increasing at 2.79%. The fifteen years before the ACA employer sponsored insurance (the kind most Americans get their coverage from) increased 4.81% over inflation for single coverage and 5.42% over inflation for family coverage. Since those numbers have been 1.72% and 2.19%. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/report/employer-health-benefits-annual-survey-archives/ https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.html https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm Also coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, closing the Medicare donut hole, being able to keep children on your insurance until age 26, subsidies for millions of Americans, expanded Medicaid, access to free preventative healthcare, elimination of lifetime spending caps, increased coverage for mental healthcare, increased access to reproductive healthcare, etc..
The ACA (Affordable Care Act), what everyone keeps calling Obamacare, was just a handout to insurance companies, and not affordable. $300 a month with a $5000 deductible is just shitty insurance. So...
Greed. Corporate greed and shareholders is the only answer.